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I kept track of my last 20 battles... In 15 of them I had a hit rate below 40%, varying from 22% to 38%. My opponents had somewhere between 35% and 79%.. I am sorry to say, but should this not be impossible??

I was wondering if this has to do with me buying 1000 ingots..?? It could be a commercial trick to give the people who haven't bought ingots an advantage over achieved customers..

I must say this is totally dissatisfying and kills all the fun of playing this game!

I was wondering if this has to do with me buying 1000 ingots..?? It could be a commercial trick to give the people who haven't bought ingots an advantage over achieved customers..

Don't believe in dark plot theories - they are often wrong, like here!

20 games is way too small a sample to perform any statistically valid computations. Come back with 1,000 games under your belt, and then we can talk. Also, you should collect the number of times each dice face comes up, not the number of hits. Hit ratios are highly variable, depending on the context of the attack. Conditional probabilities can become quickly complicated.

You have a 3 in 6 chance of hitting an infantry, that is 50%. You have a 2 in 6 chance of hitting a tank, that is 33.33333% If you are always throwing dice at tanks, you will have a lower hit rate that throwing at infantry.

In one game I had a 16% hit rate and the only targets were infantry... That is way below average. But I have also killed 6 tanks with a hit rate of 78% blow out game, caught the tanks on the back row...

But if you REALLY believe the odds are screwy and the game is plotting against you, I will gladly give your accnt to my stepson if you want to toss it.

Seriously, I've had bad dice in the board version but nothing like the online. I've had a consistent losing streak where my dice always fail at a critical moment yet my opponent gets astronomical hits! (just finished a game that I had in hand until my opponent wipped out 3 full strength tank units with 3 attacks...which, I'll note, my ambush never did trigger).

I'm at the point where playing online is now just plain frustrating. I don't enjoy losing to the dice every game.

At the end of a tabletop game, we don't see a list of what we threw... we just knew our dice sucked, or instead of shooting the Tanks we should have shot at the Infantry... Or we threw so many flags you would think a parade was going by. But online we have a Game stat report.

And we play much fewer table top games... The online is so fast to play, really, 10 min+ to set up a game, of course you swap sides, maybe several times depending on the number of tiles you need to set up. But with this, setup is instant. So we are playing more games quicker.

We as humans tend to remember hard times more easy than good ones. That is just part of how our minds remember stuff. Old leftover learning survival trait from when we wore furs and hunted with sticks.

So we remember the bad rolls, and the hard games. We tend to forget the really good rolls, but we do remember the really good games.

Stevens, thanks for the quote, but I try to inflect it a little more positively: "If we're not content to live with the luck of the dice, we should be playing chess."

I've seen a fair number of things happen in M-Online that seemed to defy probability. Of course, if there are enough such things, and if you play enough games, as Randwulf said, you'll see some of them. And I agree, they're more memorable than the average sequences of die rolls that are so much more common.

At the same time, though, I've had a feeling that the dice are streakier than if they were truly random. Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a statistician to prove whether or not that's true. (Yann has said that the randomization is proper. I'll reserve the right to both believe him and be respectfully skeptical at the same time.)

But if you look at the stats at the end of the game, you can get a little feel for certain things. The odds of hitting an infantry (assuming there are no Air Power stars or blocked retreats) is 50% on each die. For all you math geeks and spreadsheet freaks, if you roll "N" dice against infantry and you roll "R" INFs or GREs, the probability of rolling that many hits out of that many dice is COMBIN(N,R)/(2^N). So you can see how great or awful your luck was. (The formula for armor or artillery is a little messier.)

For example, if you roll 36 dice against infantry and got 12 INFs and GREs, for a pretty bad 33% hit rate, the odds of that happening are 1 in 55.

[Edit:] Clearly, I have too much time on my hands. I should be playing more Memoir.

Dear Sam,
No disrespect meant to you or your quote. I just remember your admonition to take the wins with the losses as part of play of this particular style of game.
I assure you I am not focused enough to play chess and I need the luck factor as much as anyone.

I think the longer you play Memoir the more you realize that although chance is a factor, thoughtfulness in card play and the movement and the positioning of your troops will maximize your dice throwing opportunities. He who throws the most dice will on the average have a distinct advantage.

I'm always with you on just having fun. If it wasn't fun, I would have quit a long time ago. Thanks always for patiently helping me see this when I was frustrated with my inability to coordinate my effort.

Again, be careful about perception of dice rolls. It is always difficult to overcome frustration and emotion when you are doing a critical roll and get a terrible result, even with lots of dice. Yes, this happens. Everyday.

The new thing brought by Memoir '44 Online is that you probably never played so many games in such a short time period. Which means you rolled tons of dice. Which means that you had more chances to encounter exceptional situations, and be marked by them. It's all probabilities and psychology.

This being said, I agree it would probably be useful to collect dice stats at the server level and display them on the Web site. This way, everybody would be able to see how the actual numbers compare to the theory, and be more comfortable with our random generator. We'll see how we can do this in the next release.

Seriously, I've had bad dice in the board version but nothing like the online. I've had a consistent losing streak where my dice always fail at a critical moment yet my opponent gets astronomical hits! (just finished a game that I had in hand until my opponent wipped out 3 full strength tank units with 3 attacks...which, I'll note, my ambush never did trigger).

I'm at the point where playing online is now just plain frustrating. I don't enjoy losing to the dice every game.

Taking a break.

Just my words!!!
With a boardgame at least you can shake the dice one more time or throw them in a different way - just in case it might break the deadlock. But here online there is nothing you can do about it than getting more frustated!!!
Not even with the Vassal version have I had suchs bad dice rolls!!!

We as humans tend to remember hard times more easy than good ones. That is just part of how our minds remember stuff. Old leftover learning survival trait from when we wore furs and hunted with sticks.

So we remember the bad rolls, and the hard games. We tend to forget the really good rolls, but we do remember the really good games.

So think about it, what caused the really good game???

Your bad game was someone's good game.

The Dice really do average out.

It is said to take 11 good times to wipe out 1 bad time in your mind!
Guess we're all filled up with bad times in our mind then!

This being said, I agree it would probably be useful to collect dice stats at the server level and display them on the Web site. This way, everybody would be able to see how the actual numbers compare to the theory, and be more comfortable with our random generator. We'll see how we can do this in the next release.

Yann, I agree with everything you say in your post.

In addition, it would be valuable to take the dice stats a step further than just the totals. The sequence IIIIII GGGGGG SSSSSS IIIIII FFFFFF TTTTTT would have perfectly balanced totals, but such clumpy rolls would be extraordinarily unusual.

I know that there are standard statistical tests for randomness, and there are computerized tools to implement them (though I don't know the details). Running one of those diagnostics would reassure everybody who's wanted to curse the dice.

Hello everyone:
....
This being said, I agree it would probably be useful to collect dice stats at the server level and display them on the Web site. This way, everybody would be able to see how the actual numbers compare to the theory, and be more comfortable with our random generator. We'll see how we can do this in the next release.

Yann

Thanks for your helpful comments Yann.

Displaying the stats is what I have suggested and may help us see that the rolls are - on average - fair.

DoW's willingness to consider reasonable requests is outstanding.
Keep up the good work.

Just started playing but like TheBigElk I'm smelling something funny here. I'm 6-3 total so far but in EVERY one of those 9 matches I've been way behind the AI in hit percentage. I understand that it's harder to hit tanks but that doesn't begin to make up for the discrepancy.

Until I hear that the stats above include games against AI I will believe that a 15-20% edge is written into the game. Actually, I still will believe that. There's no way the AI can lead in every category every time (total kills, tank kills AND infantry kills). Makes no sense.

Ultimately you can still overcome the disadvantage by playing very defensively, protecting injured units and grouping your forces for strong counterattacks when the enemy charges in, so I am enjoying the game anyway; I just don't see why the AI needs an advantage. It's moves are sound. If it's supposed to be a more challenging scenario just give it more units. The cheating is distasteful.

It is way to easy to blame possible poor tactical play on cheating. However, the results shown above show you that the dice are hitting on average as they should.

If you are a new player you will have a hard time against the AI.

In time you will improve. Your current strategy is probably too agressive and opens you up for more dice throws against open units. The more dice I throw the better my odds of getting a hit.

Play a little more defensively, protect your wounded units and maximize your dice throws against single units to get more kills.

I promise you, when I started playing against skilled players three years ago, I thought I could do nothing right. In time I began to see the tactitcal advantage of taking more time and planning several moves in advance. If you are simply JUST playing your current best card you will lose more often than not. Keep playing the AI it will improve your game.

I will believe that a 15-20% edge is written into the game. Actually, I still will believe that.

Sorry, you are plain wrong here.

Guys, the AI is an automated "client" that uses the exact same network protocol as your own "graphic" client. It does not have access to less or more information than *you*.

In all our online games, we have used a "paranoid protocol" philosophy to avoid cheating. To put it simply, the server does not trust the clients. For example, there is no way someone could hack the game to see the opponent's cards, simply because the server does not transmit this information. Likewise, dice rolls cannot be cheated, because they are rolled by the server - not the clients. Etc.

As I said, Johnny is just another client as far as the server is concerned, and therefore subject to the same protections. There is no way Johnny can cheat.

Just keep one thing in mind: since Johnny is a program, it is just damned better than you to compute odds and maximize his "return on investment" when rolling dice. You can trust Johnny to roll the dice that will always bring the best hit ratios.

So as Stevens suggested, you should play a bit more games. Memoir '44 is a more challenging game that it seems at first This is what makes it so interesting!

There are two problems inherent in any Pseudo random number generator. The first being Statistical distribution over a large number of samples, which in this case the figures show is not a problem. The second, however, could be the cause of the perceived loading of the dice, that is Periodicity, the maximum length of the sequence before it begins to repeat. Could it be that it tends to get stuck in a sequence, rolling one type of result for a while then moves on to the next sequence?
Perhaps the algorithm needs to be reseeded more frequently or a different seed used, but again only time and a large sample of data would show that.

But seriously, IRL bad dice are as frustrating as in the Online variant. I suffer a lot myself - I'm becoming very good at throwing flags. But then again, it's a game of luck and bad dice are part of that.

Being an old old school gamer... Not one of those video twitches, I have lots of dice. I have studied the little buggers, and they have quirks. Gamers and dice have a strange relationship.

And a quirk of probability statistics is that randomness is random.

I am throwing dice at a tank unit, I roll 2 tanks and a star. I am going to hit it again with another unit, I switch dice. Why???

I have the exact same chance mathematically of rolling a tank to hit as I did before. But probability says the same die will not roll the same side again. I have more of a chance of rolling a different side of the die. If the dice missed, I will use them again, but if they hit, I change them out.

The online game uses Math to be random. So your probability is just a little different.

In real life, I win about 65-70%, online about 55-60% so far.

Now if Sam would just quit touching my virtual dice I might roll better...